bio
photo by tess. lotta
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Jan Steckel is a retired Harvard- and Yale-traned pediatrician, an activist for bisexual and disability rights, a poet, and a writer. Her poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction have appeard widely, including in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Review, Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, Red Rock Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of three books: The Horizontal Poet (copyright 2011 Zeitgeist Press), a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Awards; Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009), which won the Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook Award; and The Underwater Hospital (copyright 2006 Zeitgeist Press), which won a Rainbow Award for lesbian and bisexual poetry. She lives in Oakland, CA with her husband, Hew Wolff.
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Fourteen Crossings |
We chose rings of braided gold,
mine red, yours white.
Your sister filled our honeymoon suite
with yellow roses.
When we rumpled the sheets,
I twisted the ring on your finger.
You laughed and said
it felt like I was adjusting your settings.
It was fetish-wear for me,
kindling more lust
than any slipped sheet bend
around my ankle or wrist.
In the rose- and -sex-scented morning,
I found you bent over a sheet of paper,
diagramming your ring.
"Three strands! Fourteen crossings!"
With a topologist's glee,
you mapped the gold intersections.
I laughed at you until you
rose and joined me in the bed.
Like a Dark Age Irish scribe,
bent over his book of knots,
you drew me out
and illuminated me.
(previously published in Red Rock Review)
copyright 2012
Jan Steckel |
